In July the situation in the Far East became even more tense after Japan invaded China. Two important events occurred on 21 August 1937. First, the USSR and China, both with eyes on Japan, signed a non-aggression pact. Second, a resolution was adopted by the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee to “Expel the Korean Population from Border Regions of the Far Eastern Territory.” In the fall of 1937 a massive operation was undertaken to arrest and deport Koreans from this vast region. More than 170,000 people were expelled. The expressed goal was to “prevent the penetration of Japanese espionage into the Far Eastern Territory.”
20
The idea that the country had to be purged of a potential fifth column, a recurring theme throughout the 1930s in the USSR, was an article of faith among Stalin’s close associates. Even many decades later, they referred to it:
Nineteen thirty-seven was necessary. If you consider that after the revolution we were slashing left and right, and we were victorious, but enemies of different sorts remained, and in the face of the impending danger of fascist aggression they might unite. We owe the fact that we did not have a fifth column during the war to ’37.
21
This was a struggle against a fifth column of Hitlerite fascism that had come to power in Germany and was preparing war against the country of the Soviets.
22
There is little doubt that Stalin encouraged these ideas among his fellow Politburo members. From their narrow perspective, he had a logical and convincing argument. The Soviet government had many internal enemies who might be keeping a low profile at the moment but were ready to leap into action as soon as the USSR was challenged by a foreign power. The relatively independent old party nomenklatura, which still had ties to the military and the NKVD, might seek to take charge. Former oppositionists were surely eager to take revenge after long years of humiliation and persecution. The kulaks and the perpetually starving peasants might band together with former members of the nobility, White Guard, and the clergy to follow the example of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and turn war with a foreign enemy into a civil war against a despised regime. Then there were the Soviet Union’s many ethnic minorities with ties to neighboring countries—Germans and Poles especially—who Stalin suspected would collaborate with an enemy based on ties of blood. The way to eliminate these dangers was to destroy as many potential enemies and collaborationists as possible. Such was the logic of Stalin’s fearful and ruthless mind as the threat of war grew. In the fevered imaginations of his inner circle, such a fifth column loomed orders of magnitude larger than it could possibly have been in reality. Phantom threats overshadowed the very real dangers confronting the Soviet Union.
WAS IT ALL YEZHOV’S FAULT?
Stalin claimed to have had no part in his own atrocities. He told the renowned Soviet aeronautical engineer Aleksandr Yakovlev that it was all Yezhov’s fault: “Yezhov was a beast! A degenerate. You’d call him at the commissariat, and they’d tell you, ‘He went to the Central Committee.’ You’d call the Central Committee, and they’d tell you, ‘He went to his office.’ You’d send someone to his house, and it turns out that he’s lying on his bed dead drunk. Many innocent lives were lost. That’s why we shot him.”
23
The winding down of the Great Terror in late 1938 and early 1939 was accompanied by a campaign to deflect suspicion away from its true perpetrators. This effort was helped by Yezhov’s removal and the very public unmasking of “slanderers” who had submitted denunciations against honest people—supposedly a major cause of the repression. Even today some are willing to argue Stalin’s innocence, proposing pseudo-scholarly theories that the Great Terror erupted spontaneously on the initiative of local officials. Of course, once Moscow issued its orders, the momentum generated was bound to look elemental. In the bureaucratic language of the Stalin era, the behavior of zealous officials was labeled
peregiby
(excesses). But it was not excesses that determined the scale and ferocity of the Terror. The documentary evidence shows that large-scale operations rarely deviated from Stalin’s orders.
After Moscow’s arrest and execution quotas were received by the NKVD headquarters of each oblast (province) and
krai
(a territory similar to a province but containing semi-autonomous administrative units), the regional NKVD chief would gather the heads of local (municipal and district) NKVD offices for a meeting, at which the regional quota would be parceled out among the administrative entities (districts, towns, villages, settlements). The first source used in compiling a list of enemies was the card files that the political police kept on various suspected “anti-Soviet elements,” as well as any other compromising materials that came to hand. After a victim was arrested, an investigation was conducted to expose his or her “counterrevolutionary ties” or uncover the existence of “counterrevolutionary organizations.”
24
The necessary “evidence” was obtained using a variety of methods, most often torture, which was officially sanctioned by the country’s top leadership. The forms of torture were brutal and sometimes caused an arrestee’s death. One major goal of interrogation was to obtain testimony implicating others, thus generating a second wave of arrestees, who in turn provided more names. These police operations could, in theory, continue indefinitely, or until the potential pool of victims had been thoroughly drained. Such operations did not continue only because Stalin had full control of the state security system and party apparat and could close the spigot whenever he wanted. Every decision to sentence a presumed enemy to a labor camp or to be shot was approved in Moscow.
At first it was assumed that these large-scale operations would conclude at the end of 1937. Gradually, the date was moved back to November 1938. On 17 January 1938, Stalin sent NKVD chief Yezhov new orders:
The SR [Socialist Revolutionary Party] line (both left and right) has not been fully uncovered.… It is important to keep in mind that there are still many SRs in our army and outside the army. Can the NKVD account for the (“former”) SRs in the army? I would like to see a report promptly. Can the NKVD account for “former” SRs outside the army (in civil institutions)? I also would like a report in two–three weeks.… What has been done to expose and arrest all Iranians in Baku and Azerbaijan? For your information, at one time the SRs were very strong in Saratov, Tambov, and the Ukraine, in the army (officers), in Tashkent and Central Asia in general, and at the Baku electrical power stations, where they became entrenched and sabotaged the oil industry. We must act more swiftly and intelligently.
25
This document is one of many pieces of evidence that Stalin played the decisive role in organizing the Great Terror and that Yezhov was following his orders. Archival records clearly show Stalin to be the initiator of all key decisions having to do with purges of party and government institutions and the mass operations that swept up ordinary citizens. He not only ordered the arrest and execution of hundreds of thousands of people, but he also took a strong interest in the details. He sent telegrams about the need to make particular arrests, threatened dire consequences for insufficient vigilance, and signed lists of members of the nomenklatura to be executed and imprisoned. In many cases he personally decided whether someone would be shot or sent to a labor camp.
26
Overseeing the large-scale operations to wipe out enemies took up a significant portion of the dictator’s time in 1937–1938. Over a twenty-month period from January 1937 to August 1938, he received fifteen thousand
spetssoobshchenii
(special communications) reporting on arrests and the conduct of various secret police operations or requesting approval for a particular act of repression, usually accompanied by interrogation protocols (transcripts). On a typical day, he received twenty-five documents from Yezhov, some running to many pages.
27
Furthermore, the record of visitors to Stalin’s office shows that during 1937 and 1938, Yezhov visited him almost 290 times and spent a total of 850 hours with him. The only person who visited more often was Molotov.
28
Yezhov was a capable and motivated pupil. He organized the trials of former oppositionists and conducted day-to-day oversight of the giant machine of repression. He personally participated in interrogations and issued orders to apply torture. To please Stalin, who always demanded greater efforts in the fight against enemies and constantly pointed to new threats, Yezhov encouraged his subordinates to exceed the Politburo’s targets for mass arrests and executions and to fabricate new conspiracies. To encourage them, the NKVD and Yezhov personally were lavished with praise throughout 1937 and most of 1938. Yezhov was given every conceivable award and title and simultaneously held several key party and government posts. Cities, factories, and kolkhozes were named after him.
Despite these signs that Stalin was pleased with his people’s commissar for internal affairs, there is evidence that the
vozhd
was maintaining a certain distance, even as Yezhov and his organization were lavished with praise for their excellent work in exposing enemies. Inevitably, Stalin eventually brought the mass extermination to a halt and blamed the “excesses” and “violations of law” on Yezhov and his subordinates. Stalin laid the groundwork for Yezhov’s removal gradually and systematically. In August 1938, he appointed Lavrenty Beria, first party secretary for Georgia, to serve as Yezhov’s deputy. On the surface, nothing had changed. Yezhov still seemed to enjoy power and favor. But now, by his side was a man he would never have chosen. Several months later Yezhov even alluded to Beria’s appointment in a letter to Stalin, describing it as showing “an element of mistrust toward me” and admitting that he saw “[Beria’s] appointment as preparation for my being relieved.”
29
He was right. Unable to cope with the stress of the situation, he descended into alcoholism and lost control of both the NKVD and himself.
Two months after Beria’s appointment, Stalin took further steps toward Yezhov’s removal. On 8 October 1938 the Politburo established a commission to draft a resolution concerning the NKVD. Yezhov’s subordinates began to be arrested. Beria’s henchmen set to work beating testimony against Yezhov out of them, just as Yezhov’s henchmen had done when he was building a case against his precedessor, Genrikh Yagoda. On 17 November the Politburo adopted a transparently hypocritical and mendacious resolution remarking on NKVD successes in destroying “enemies of the people and foreign intelligence agencies’ espionage-sabotage networks” but also condemning “shortcomings and perversions” in the NKVD’s work.
30
While repeatedly demanding an intensified struggle against enemies, Stalin had never questioned the mission of mass terror that he himself had conceived and promoted. Yezhov and the NKVD now stood accused of doing what Stalin had ordered them to do. If Yezhov had been allowed to make a serious case for himself, he would have had no trouble doing so. But as he knew better than anyone, that was not how the Stalinist system worked. All he could do was hope and repent.
Having done his job, the faithful Yezhov was no longer needed. He was arrested and shot as the head of a (nonexistent) counterrevolutionary organization within the NKVD. Stalin apparently did not feel the need to goad excessive public outrage, and Yezhov’s downfall was arranged without fanfare. The cautious tidiness with which he was removed shows that Stalin was reluctant to draw public attention to the activities of the NKVD and the mechanics of the Great Terror. Yezhov was Stalin’s senior scapegoat. He paid the ultimate price so that his
vozhd
could remain above suspicion. For the Soviet people, the Terror became the “Yezhovshchina”—a term using a Russian suffix suggesting some rampant evil.
The final stage of the Great Terror—its unwinding, which Stalin carefully controlled—mainly targeted Yezhov’s top lieutenants at the NKVD. A miniscule number of ordinary citizens swept up by the large-scale operations—primarily those who had fallen into NKVD clutches during the second half of 1938—were released. The machinery of terror remained in place with only minor adjustments, and ruthless repression continued until Stalin’s death. The
vozhd
never stopped believing that enemies were all around or demanding that they be unmasked, arrested, and tortured. But he never again resorted to repression on the scale seen during 1937–1938.
Stalin must have been aware of the Terror’s devastating consequences, yet he never, either in public or even within his inner circle, questioned its necessity. But the consequences could not have escaped his attention. A huge number of those responsible for running the Soviet economy had been arrested. Workplace discipline suffered, and engineers were afraid to propose any changes or innovations that might later subject them to unscrupulous accusations of “wrecking.” The Terror led to a sizable decline in the rate of growth in industrial production.
31
The military too suffered from a shrinking pool of experienced and competent commanders and a decline in discipline and responsibility. The Red Army was so heavily affected by repression that the Soviet leadership was forced to return many previously arrested or discharged commanders to service, at least those the NKVD had not yet had time to execute.
32
The Great Terror of 1937–1938 put huge stresses on Soviet society and caused widespread misery. Millions of people were directly affected. Many who escaped being shot, confined to labor camps, or subjected to internal deportation lost their jobs or were evicted from their apartments or even towns for the sole crime of having ties to “enemies of the people.” Such abuses and upheavals could not be forgiven and passively accepted. Although fear was a fairly effective means of keeping the population from expressing its displeasure, grievances were lodged. In 1937–1938, these grievances mainly took the form of the millions of complaints that came pouring into government and party offices. In January 1937 alone, 13,000 complaints were filed with the procuracy, and in February–March 1938 the number reached 120,000.
33
It has not yet been established how many letters and petitions were sent to Stalin himself during the Great Terror or how many actually reached his desk. The records are either inaccessible or were not preserved. We can only assume that Stalin’s office was inundated with such petitions. The
vozhd
could not have been entirely shielded from his subjects’ desperation, grief, and disillusionment.